Film Series in NYC This Week

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Our guide to film series and special screenings. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.

FILM IS LIKE A BATTLEGROUND: SAM FULLER’S WAR MOVIES at the Museum of the Moving Image (Sept. 15-24). Mr. Fuller was a director who not only went to war but also returned to it repeatedly as a subject, in films as personal and visceral as a knife to the throat. “The Big Red One” (Friday), released in 1980 and screening in a reconstructed version from 2004, is based directly on his experiences. But he also used his war movies to reflect on American social and racial conflicts, as in the lean 1951 Korean War film “The Steel Helmet” (Saturday), starring Gene Evans as the lone survivor of an executed squad who links up with a South Korean boy (William Chun), an African-American army medic (James Edwards) and others; and in “China Gate” (Sept. 23), a 1957 feature starring Gene Barry, Angie Dickinson and Nat King Cole that pondered the combustible mix of influences in Vietnam seven years before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
718-784-0077, movingimage.us

‘TIME TO DIE’ at Film Forum (Sept. 15-21). A setup that might sound conventional for a western — a prisoner (Jorge Martinez de Hoyos) is released after 18 years and returns home, where the sons of the man he was sentenced for killing aren’t eager to let him live in peace — comes with an uncommon literary pedigree: The future Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez and the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes collaborated on the screenplay. In his debut feature, the director Arturo Ripstein, a scion of the Mexican film industry and a protégé of Luis Buñuel, already showed a flair for dynamic staging and long takes. Shown in 1966, one year before the publication of García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the film is said to be receiving its first American release.
212-727-8110, filmforum.org

UCLA FESTIVAL OF PRESERVATION at the Metrograph (Sept. 15-20). This touring program of recent restorations from the film and television archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a grab bag of sure bets (Ernst Lubitsch’s sublime “Trouble in Paradise,” showing Friday and Sunday; Alfred Werker and Anthony Mann’s noir “He Walked by Night,” screening Saturday); historically significant titles (Howard Alk’s 1971 documentary “The Murder of Fred Hampton,” showing Friday and Sunday through Wednesday); and sheer oddities. The last category includes two virtually unknown features by Juleen Compton, an independent director who worked on her own eccentric terms. She stars in “Stranded” (Saturday), a 1965 travelogue with a bit of a “Band of Outsiders” vibe that follows Raina (Ms. Compton), her lover and her friend on a discursive getaway in Greece. In the terrifically titled “The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean” (Saturday), from 1966, Norma Jean (Sharon Henesy) has psychic powers. The members of a rock group (one played by a young Sam Waterston, credited as Samuel) take advantage of her gift to draw in crowds for their act — which, yes, is staged in a plastic dome.
212-660-0312, metrograph.com

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